From the research paper “Zinc Oxide–Titania Heterojunction-based Solid Nanospheres as Photoanodes for Electron-Trapping in Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells” authored by Ritu Gupta and Rakesh K. Sharma (Assistant Professors of Chemistry) and Kiran P. Shejale and Devika Laishram (Ph.D. Students of Department of Chemistry), which was published in the May 2017 issue of Energy Technology: Generation, Conversion, Storage, Distribution, published by Wiley Interscience, a figure depicting the “schematic of synthesized TiO2 nanospheres and the changes brought about by the incorporation of ZnO” was chosen to be on the cover of the Journal.

Hierarchical TiO2/ZnO nanospheres: The ZnO/TiO2nanospheres are aggregates of crystallites of ZnO that are uniformly dispersed over TiO2 to make heterojunctions. This study describes the different doping percentages tested with the optimized value of 1 % showing the best efficiency and the highest porous surface area among the samples. The spherical morphology of the synthesized material provides good light harvesting by efficiently trapping electrons. Moreover, this arrangement leads to increased electron carrier density, leading to highly efficient solar cells.

More details can be found in the full paper by Kiran P. Shejale, Devika Laishram, Ritu Gupta and Rakesh K. Sharma from the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur on page 489 in Issue 3, 2017 (DOI: 10.1002/ente.201600357).

Please click here for high resolution cover picture.